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Random things on a Thursday

The same gymnastics hall where my kids go for a weekly rough'n'tumble playing session runs similar classes for adults, twice a week.

And I'm not talking about gymnastics here - not the 'organised' kind, anyway. (The gym does run those, but I'm not attending one of those classes.) What I'm attending is a casual, twice-a-week, come-if-you-like session where people who aren't gymnasts come so they can learn things.

It feels awesome to have found it. I basically finish an hour and a half of 'doing stuff' (trampolines, mostly) and leave the building knackered out to a point that I don't even want to walk up the two steps to my house when I get back, but already I am looking forward to going again next week; and I've actually got blisters on my wrists from the trampoline.

It's like a... Maria bliss. I get to use a well-equipped gymnastics hall, do it in my own time, not even have to share it with that many people and when I arrive, my trainer asks me, "So, what would you like to work on today?" and then he teaches me those things.

Like... huh?

Awesome :)

PS. And by the way, yes, I do struggle to use my neck and muscles in general the next day.

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The first week of school means running through basic math principles so our tutor can gage where everyone is with their math skills, and make sure that when we get into architectural plans there isn't anyone lifting their arm up and asking, "Uhm, excuse me, but what's a pythagoras?"

Which means that for the moment I do assignments the likes of "Little Johnny mows lawns at 50 cents per square metre".

It's like being back in high school.

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The Kid has asked me to make him a tiger tail for the longest time, so last week I walked into a second hand shop with the idea of buying an orange t-shirt that I can cut sleeves off, and then making those sleeves into two 'tiger tails'. One for The Kid, one for The Girlie.

And I did.

I really did make those tails.

But in addition to those tails I also got The Kid 1) an entire tiger costume and a 2) tiger-shaped hat because, well, second hand shops sell cool stuff and it's only a few dollars, so, yeah: here's what you can see in our home quite often now.

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I know it's only the beginning of the school year, so it's probably going to calm down a lot, but... Invercargill is actually quite a lively place with all these students milling about.

I like it!

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I have given notice on our current rental house. On the 7th of March we are getting the keys to our new home.

There's usually about 5-6 of us there in the evenings, and we arrive at different times, so we don't tend to do the same stuff at the same time. I, for example, arrive at about 19:00 and after doing some warm-up I head for the trampoline where the tutor has given me a few exercises to try. After about 5-10 minutes I'm pretty puffed so I'll get off and do some stretching or something. Every now and again the tutor comes to see how I'm doing, points out the mistakes and shows me how to do something better.

Meanwhile, another guy is on the mat practicing a sort of a... break-dance jumping. I think he's done it for a while, because he seems to know what he's doing and doesn't need the tutor's input: he just does his jumps, and turns, and flips, all whilst he's got music in his headphones :)

Then another guy arrives. He does some strength-building exercises: jumps with the jumprope, does pull-ups on the bars, and similar stuff on the monkeybars.

About 19:30 another girl arrives, she likes to practice on the trampoline, too, so we take turns with her: I'll jump for 1-2 minutes, then she, then me again, then she. She's done it much longer than I have, so she shows me how to fix things.

And then another girl arrives. She used to do gymnastics when she was younger, but now she hasn't done it for a long time, so she's trying to re-learn flips on the bars, and technical jumps.

Basically, we kind of potter around the hall, each person working on their own thing, the tutor goes from one to the other, and there may also be about 6 teens there who stay after their class which finishes earlier in the evening, but now they're mostly just goofing around, playing ball and seeing who can jump a backflip the furthest and stuff like that.